Archive for October 10th, 2008

Hey, so in the wake of a lot of emails we had an evening of discussion about the upcoming federal election. We each spoke a bit about where we’re at re: the big decision and then we perused Fiona’s lovely handouts of the big parties platform info that’s available on the internet, admitted the flaws but pragmatism in identifying as ‘left’ or ‘right’, instead of taking each issue separately, explored the realities of websites that advocate strategic voting, fleshed out the GINI-coefficient and some of the tax cut issues, and bemoaned the lack of breakfast table political discussion (in Canada specifically).

Anyway, looking back on the talk I’m struck by a couple of topics that highlighted the intersections of different issues. Intersections are big in feminism, right?

I’d say it was our first discussion as a group that really didn’t feature women’s issues in particular, but of course we wanted to hear about those issues if anyone could enlighten us. Fiona made this really great observation: look at the issues that make up these platforms, and you’ll see that even though ‘women’s issues’ per se isn’t on the agenda, most of the issues that are featured affect women differently. Let’s take a couple of obvious ones for example. Poverty. Affects women disproportionately. Child care. Well, duh, right? Women’s issues are there, you just have to do a little interpreting.

We discussed the Green Party a fair bit. Other parties are starting to feature things in their platforms that look pretty reminiscent of the Green’s. The Greens are all for it, and if they’ve exerted some influence toward environmental initiatives by their quick rise in popularity, more’s the better. The question arose, though, whether you can really envision them as a leading national party. You know, they come across as pretty one-issue. An interesting response to this was again, that this one issue can be interpreted to intersect with all kinds of other issues. Agriculture with a green hand, taxes with a green hand, job creation with a green hand. You get the picture.

Interesting stuff to consider as we all (I hope) head off to the election booth!